With the advent of cloud storage and the associated proliferation of cloud storage providers, organizations and individuals alike with data storage needs both large and small have begun to assess the feasibility of utilizing cloud storage. For example, an organization that maintains a privately owned data center that hosts data of the organization may wish to tier data to the cloud depending on issues such as price, ease of access, data security, etc. While cloud storage can provide benefits to organizations with varied data storage needs, some organizations may not want to compromise on issues like, for example, data security, by moving their entire set of data to a cloud storage provider.
One way an organization could potentially reduce their private data storage costs may be to tier some of their data to a public cloud while still maintaining a set of data in their private data center. In deciding to tier some data to the cloud, it may be advantageous to still have a inventory and accounting of all data tiered to the cloud within the private data center, while providing easy means to restore tiered cloud data to the private data center upon demand. For example, if your private data center storage interface was unaware of the data the organization is also storing in a public cloud, an information technology professional or end user may have to search for and/or use the data utilizing at least two separate and distinct interfaces. Thus, there exists a need to manage data both stored in a private data center and data tiered from the private data center to a public cloud from a single interface.
In addition to managing both privately hosted data and public cloud data from a common interface, a public cloud data tiering solution may also need to reduce external dependencies on the public cloud storage provider, by creating and utilizing data structures necessary to pass data to and from the cloud storage provider based on the needs of the data storage client. For example, data must be able to be both readable and writable from and to the public cloud. In another example, data storage services such as snapshots and backup must remain compatible with data tiered to the cloud. It can be appreciated that a litany of issues must be addressed to eliminate performance bottlenecks and create a scalable and efficient solution for data storage customers.